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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

Interop: The Cloud Finds Firm Footing in Hybrid Networking

Networking technologies tend to evolve slowly, so this week’s Interop show didn’t contain a lot of entirely new ideas. Some trends did stand out to me at the show, however.

I was impressed by how many vendors talked about “hybrid networks,” where enterprises connect their own data centers to cloud-based services. I heard a lot more about “virtual networking” and more about managing mobile devices.

The push toward hybrid networks isn’t new, of course, but it does seem to be moving beyond the concept stage to the point where enterprise customers are experimenting with it. Of course, “cloud” has been the big trend in networking for the past couple of years. All sorts of companies offer cloud hosting, (sometimes called infrastructure as a service), platform as a service, and software as a service entries. With companies ranging from the big ISPs to Oracle now getting in the cloud business, it’s clear this is appealing to large enterprises, as well.

This theme was reiterated by Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Terremark in yesterday’s keynote. Ellen Rubin, founder of Cloudswitch,which was recently acquired by Terremark (which itself is part of Verizon), told me that even in the same organizations, customers were combining cloud services, managed hosting, and their own data centers. The biggest companies were being “very practical” in picking which applications go where, based on the kind of application, hardware requirements, geography, and whether they are mission critical.

Cloudswitch’s technology abstracts the details of the environment from the application. This way, customers can take their internal applications and move them quickly to cloud services from Amazon or Terremark, including support for many variations of Windows and Linux.

Other vendors talked about how to secure network connections among multiple locations. For instance, Vyatta mentioned “cloud virtualization” and running network infrastructure as an application. Tom McCaffery of Vyatta said the company’s products could be used to create a VPN tunnel from one Amazon data center to another, or between a company’s data center and Amazon’s. Generally, the company runs its network infrastructure applications as just another virtual machine; it can run its products on a conventional Intel quad-core server and still get nearly 10Gbps throughput.

Many companies are discussing management and distribution of applications in a cloud-based world. Getting applications to work efficiently and securely in multiple locations, and when working with branch offices and travelling employees, is a big issue.

F5’s Alan Murphy stressed how the company was focused on particular applications, speeding application delivery and availability. He also talked about using the cloud for disaster recovery. The company pushed its Global Traffic Manager, a new IPv6 package, and DNS Express offerings.

In a different take on the same issues, Cisco announced a new family of Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) appliances and services, designed also to handle application delivery on a more general basis. The company’s Andrew Harding told me the more general approach was necessary because in today’s environments video and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) applications take up so much bandwidth.

Another prominent theme was the concept of radically rethinking networks, much the way enterprise servers and storage have largely been virtualized in recent years. Big Switch talked about “network virtualization” with a “Big Virtual Switch” as part of its OpenFlow products. This lets you reconfigure and “recarve” networks very quickly, and lets you use one physical box that can be configured as many different virtual networks. So, for instance, each application could have its own set of policies.

In Wednesday’s keynote, Cisco’s Sujai Hajela pitched the concept of “BYOD” (Bring Your Own Device), which he later agreed would happen gradually. Still, he thought organizations would embrace the concept because it ultimately brings a lot more flexibility. The big question, he said, is how seamlessly things like access and security policies can be deployed by IT administrators.

He continued to push 802.11u, a security enhancement to existing Wi-Fi networks in which individual devices can be authorized to use a specific network. This is done in the way SIM cards authorize particular phones to use GSM cellular networks.

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